Marta Minujín

An unreleased diary film shot during the Fairleigh-Dickinson Artist Seminar simultaneous to the production of Back and Forth by Michael Snow.

"Academia del fracaso" is a speculative aesthetic fact of a polemic nature, as Marta Minujín explains when she talks about her work. Portrayed in this film explaining the functioning of her participatory performance in 1974, the artist extends herself to reflect and talk about some things, many things, that make up the world and its ideas.

It investigates the life and work of the plastic artist Marta Minujin, icon of Argentine art. Through his exhibitions in New York, Calí and Paris, and his own testimony, and that of colleagues and family, the documentary highlights his unclassifiable universe and reveals unknown details of his history. Marta is not just her performances, paintings and sculptures. Marta has created a world where she is her own work.

Marta Minujín’s work is defined by its ephemeral nature—actions living in the present, performances destined to disappear due to the absence of documentation. During her stay in New York, she added cinema to her art practice, and upon returning to Buenos Aires, she shot a number of short films. In Autogeografía, she puts her own body in front of the camera, articulating recording and representation in an early video-performance work. Derived from her action Comunicando con tierra (where she extracted soil from the Machu Picchu which she later exchanged with other Latin American Artists), a purification ritual takes place—Minujín covers herself up in “barbarity,” soil and grains that anonymous hands throw at her from out of field. A territory for exploration where the absurd embraces the real—“The only thing that is true is what we invent.”

Footage of beatniks and hippies from the end of the '60s.